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  <div id="header">uci@home<span id="menu">Project Overview</span></div>
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    <h1>Introduction</h1>

	<p>National focus on energy conservation is at an all-time high. Although empirical studies on the topic date back to the 1970s, the need for solutions persists. Residential electricity use is a prime target for interventions because:
		<ul>
			<li>the residential sector makes up a significant percentage of overall U.S. energy,</li>
			<li>electricity use has grown steadily over the past decade, and</li>
			<li>conservation and increased energy efficiency have the ability to significantly stem additional growth.</li>
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		</ul>
The aim of this project is to create an affordable and effective at-home energy feedback system informed by current knowledge in both the physical and social sciences. A tightly integrated, transdisciplinary collaboration will simultaneously optimize the environmental, economic, engineering and psychological aspects of the design.</p>
	
	<p>This page describes a hardware and software prototyping platform designed to provide a flexible <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/02/googlemeter/">data-gathering ecosystem</a> within a home and integrate with smart-grid technology. The design will be iteratively refined as its key requirements are identified through on ongoing process of literature review and data collection. The prototype will eventually be scaled up to support demonstrations and a community-based pilot study.</p>

    <h1>Architecture</h1>

	<p>The basic system architecture being considered consists of 5-20 monitoring devices within a home that all communicate with a central hub. We expect that this approach will minimize the overall installation cost but will also consider other approaches, such as a symmetric mesh network, to test this hypothesis.</p>
	
	<img src="GroundFloor.png" style="margin-left:100px" />
	
	<p>The target cost for individual monitoring devices is $10-20. Each device consists of a programmable microcontroller, sensors, and a wireless communications interface. The hub is a piece of software that records and analyzes the data collected from each hub and presents a customizable digest to the homeowner through a web interface. The hub adds no extra cost in homes where there is already a computer available; otherwise, the hub requires dedicated computer hardware costing $100-200. In addition to sending data to the hub, each device provides real-time feedback through simple visual and auditory cues. In a household with an internet connection, the hub software will incorporate data from local utilities and weather forecasts, for example, to provide context for data gathered within the home. Sharing of information collected within a neighborhood or region through a social network also has potential to be explored.</p>
	
	<img src="ModuleBlockDiagram.png" style="margin-left:100px" />

    <h1>Device Prototype</h1>

	<p>The prototyping device is based on an Atmel AVR microcontroller core, using the open-source <a href="http://www.arduino.cc/">Arduino platform</a>. Analog sensor readings are digitized with 10-bit resolution at speeds of up to 10 kHz, after appropriate signal conditioning. Sensors within the device are capable of monitoring the following parameters at the device's location:
		<ul>
			<li>ambient temperature,</li>
			<li>lighting conditions, including a capability to discriminate between natural and artificial lighting,</li>
			<li>power consumption in an outlet or power strip, and</li>
			<li>human occupancy, through some combination of ultra-sound motion sensing, audio capture, and the detection of characteristic lighting and power consumption signatures.</li>
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		</ul>
		The ultimate design of the sensor package will balance environmental, economic, engineering and psychological factors. The purpose of the current prototype is to provide a flexible environment to support the optimization process.</p>

		<p>The current design focus is on an individual device, but the final system will include wireless communication between each device and the hub and, possibly, also communication between devices. Standard wireless solutions for computers are relatively expensive and far exceed the requirements of this application. Therefore, in addition to WiFi and Bluetooth networking, solutions based on the <a href="http://www.zigbee.org/">ZigBee standard</a> and even cheaper radio transmitters will be considered. The low cost and bandwidth requirements and relatively capable microcontroller of this system present an interesting optimization challenge.</p>
		
		<p>The prototype device provides both visual and auditory feedback, via a multi-color LED and a piezoelectric speaker, both under software control. The purpose of these low-cost signaling mechanisms is to provide automatic real-time feedback during the time when the home's residents are not at a computer. The video clip below demonstrates these features.</p>
		
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    <h1>Hub Prototype</h1>

	<p>The hub prototype consists of software for a home computer that simultaneously logs and analyzes the data collected wirelessly from each device, and provides the home's residents with various customizable summaries in the form of interactive web pages. The software is written in python and also includes javascript programs that run in a user's browser. The prototype makes extensive use of industry-standard open-source libraries such as <a href="http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TwistedWeb">Twisted Matrix</a> and <a href="http://jquery.com/">jQuery</a>. Integration with the <a href="http://www.google.org/powermeter/">Google power meter</a> software is being considered.</p>

	<p>The prototype provides a flexible platform to explore the effectiveness of various feedback strategies. Data is currently presented as time-series graphs, optimized for engineering studies, but the ultimate goal is to provide high-level feedback "messages" through a variety of mechanisms, including web pages, email and text messaging. Relevant information sources outside the home, such as local weather and utility company "smart grid" monitoring can be easily integrated and would provide valuable context to at-home consumption to households with internet access. Automated feedback control loops, using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_(industry_standard)">X10</a> for example, are also under investigation.</p>
	
	<p>The annotated web browser capture below illustrates some of the current hub software capabilities and displays real data collected with a device prototype.</p>

<img src="HubDemo.png" style="margin-left:100px"/>

<p>For additional information about this project, contact dkirkby at uci.edu</p>

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